Kathryn Hughes
Can you Drop a Kindle in the Bath?

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When I was young I dreamed of one day having my own book-lined room. It wasn't that we didn't have books at home, but there weren't tottering mounds of them, let alone bulging shelves. For one thing, we were thrifty users of the local library, which meant operating a strict revolving-door policy: one volume out for every one that came in. Individual books simply didn't have time to set up home.

I knew that not everyone lived like this because you'd sometimes see pictures in the Sunday supplements of Peter Hall or Jonathan Miller at home in their studies. Behind them would be hand-built shelves (no Ikea for them), stuffed higgledy piggledy with books. Where they'd run out of space you could see that they'd simply wedged volumes horizontally wherever they could find the hint of a gap. To my teenage way of thinking, it looked like a metaphor for their lives: full to overflowing with intellectual richness, prodigal in its possibilities. Clearly, the Miller and Hall households didn't feel the need to troop down to the library on Saturday morning to fetch next week's reading matter.

Twenty years on, and I don't have one but three book-lined rooms. I also have piles of books under my bed, on top of the wardrobe and in a damp heap in the bathroom. Having spent the past twenty years as a critic and writer, I've managed to amass 4,000 volumes which have to be crammed into an average-sized London flat. And I can't tell you how much I resent it. Far from being the visual representation of a well-stocked mind, these lumpen lodgers represent my virtual house arrest. Only last year I was close to moving home, but the thought of dragging my flatmates along made me give up in despair. Trapped in a relationship that stops me doing the things I really want, I nonetheless lack the will or the energy to change my situation. There's probably a support group out there for people just like me.

Of course, I do routinely cull my books, sending those I don't want to the charity shop. But the ones which remain simply breed - you can hear the ominous rustles in the night as they climb down from the shelves on their way to make bookish whoopee. They are also, though it might be a tad indelicate to mention it, often not terribly clean. They attract dust like nobody's business and the ones which arrive second-hand via the Internet often look as though they might be incubating their own particular strain of the Black Death. The only time they have a wash is when I accidentally drop one while reading in the bath.

So you can imagine how excited I've been ever since the e-book has stopped being the sort of thing you used to hear about on Tomorrow's World. As someone who combines intense bibliophilia (that's when I'm not hating the blighters) with a dork-like devotion to new technology, this has always seemed like a match made in heaven. More books and a new gadget, in the shape of the e-reader, to play with. Heaven.

And for the first few weeks with my e-reader things were, I admit, pretty peachy. The reader itself was clean and crisp and did all the things it said it would - like storing zillions of books without blinking an eyelid. The newspapers too - I have to read several a day for my job - arrived neat and uncrumpled and without that nasty tendency to leave inky residue on the fingers. You could even make notes in the margin with the special stylus, something which was always going to be essential for a committed marginalia merchant like myself. Of course, there were a few gripes - not enough of the books I want to read are yet available in digital format - but basically I was thrilled with my new piece of kit. Why, I could even fantasise that, one day, I'd be living in the way I'd always dreamed, in a minimalist loft uncluttered by 4,000 mulish, sullen, silent lodgers all daring me to slap them with an eviction order.

But, after a few weeks with the e-reader, the love affair started to go a bit flat. For, though I never thought it possible, there were some things I was starting to miss about my books. There was the smell for one thing: that lovely, peaty whiff that always takes me to a calm and happy place. No matter how much you love your e-reader, you never feel the urge to bury your nose in it. Then there was the fact that, for all that they're lumbering clodhoppers, books are actually just the right size and shape for doing little jobs around the house. You can prop open doors with them, right wobbly table legs, even use them, in an emergency, as a beach pillow. You can scribble down shopping lists on them (technically you can do this with the e-reader but, somehow, it doesn't seem to encourage that kind of familiarity). And, of course, you can squash, biff and dampen a book without it making much of a protest. I don't know for certain, but I suspect that the Kindle, Iliad or Sony Reader might all object to being dropped in the bath.

So there you have it. After years of dreaming about a book-lined room and then doing everything I could to dismantle it, I'm back where I almost started. I had a cull recently, but that only seems to have got the surviving volumes feeling that it's their bounden duty to reproduce. Switch off the light, look the other way, and I swear you can hear them rushing off to make babies in the old-fashioned, technologically unassisted way.

Kathryn Hughes is Professor of Life Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her most recent book, 'The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton', is published by Fourth Estate.